Despite its "rustic" colour, commercial brown sugar is not any less processed than white sugar. Somewhat shockingly, it’s actually a little bit more refined – and it’s all to do with how it’s made.

Here in Australia, a huge majority of our sugar comes the sugarcane plant, which prospers along the coastline of the country's northern eastern.

After growing the cane for up to two years, farmers harvest their crop and have it milled, where great machines extract a type of "juice" from the plants. This juice is then boiled down and thrown in a spinning centrifuge to help it crystallise.

At this point, the crystals have a light-brown colour – this is sold as "raw sugar". From there, the manufacturers will put the raw sugar back into the centrifuge, and keep spinning it until the brown molasses has been totally removed from the stark-white sucrose crystals, creating "white sugar".

Then, to make brown sugar (sometimes referred to as "commercial brown sugar"), the manufacturers then add back in a dose of molasses to produce a more caramel colour.

This isn’t some devilish move to sell more sugar – brown sugar is deliberately created because it holds more moisture than white sugar, makes cookies chewier, and provides a different taste best suited to baking.

Really, it's all about the preferences of your tastebuds.

Looking at the numbers, a 4-gram teaspoon of white sugar will give you about 16 calories, while a teaspoon of brown sugar actually gives you marginally more energy at 17 calories.

(That probably makes you conclude that brown sugar is actually worse than white sugar, but in reality the difference of a single calorie is so minute that your body wouldn't be able to tell.)

In fact, Burrell says it doesn't really matter what kind of sugar you put in your tea or coffee – from brown to raw to honey – our body treats it in much the same way.

What’s far more important is the quantity, which we know can be responsible for everything from weight gain to chronic disease, type 2 diabetes and more.

"In terms of how it affects our bodies, sugar is sugar is sugar. It's a concentrated source of energy," says Burrell.

"It's not about what type of sugar you're consuming as opposed to how much – in general the less added sugars in our diets, the better."